Saturday, March 08, 2014

Feminine Articles

It’s
International Women’s Day so I thought I’d write a piece about my struggle, here
in France, with all things feminine.

Well,
not all things feminine. Nouns mostly. After twenty-seven years in this
country, you’d think I’d have got the hang of this le/la, un/une business but pas
du tout. I provide endless amusement for my French friends and colleagues
because I still get it wrong.

I
mean, some words just sound feminine to my worryingly gender-stereotyped
(I’ve just realized) mind. Like nuage…soft and fluffy, it’s actually masculine. Or pétale,
which is also masculine. And then there is victime and personne, which are feminine.
So when the newsreader refers to a male murder victim as ‘elle’, I get terribly
confused.

As
for délice, amour and orgue, these masculine nouns become feminine in the
plural. In fact, orgue can be either masculine or feminine in the plural
depending on…oh, never mind…something to do with stops and bellows, no doubt.

Fortunately,
my life has been made easier in recent years as the government attempts to
feminise job titles whilst provoking apoplexy in that bastion of the French
language, the Académie Française. For example, it is now acceptable to refer to
laministre, if the MP in question is a woman. I can also speak of une
ingénieure, une auteure or une professeure and nobody laughs at me. But if I’m
feeling particularly mischievous, I might mention a primary school teacher I
know (une maîtresse) whose name is… Madame Lemaître. That keeps ‘em guessing.

Madame,
of course, is the title given to a married woman. There is no equivalent of 'Ms'
in French: you are either Madame or Mademoiselle. But this is about to change.
In February, a ministerial circular declared that Mademoiselle should be
removed from all administrative documents, along with the terms nom de jeune fille
(maiden name) and nom d’époux (husband’s name).

While
this is a good move, it didn’t stop me from being inordinately pleased the other
day when the woman in the supermarket called me to her checkout.

“Mademoiselle…”
she began.

I
raised my head from the magazines I’d been looking at and smiled graciously.
The anti-wrinkle cream must be paying off.

She
clapped her hand to her mouth.

“Ooh,
I’m terribly sorry,” she squealed for all to hear. “You’re so small, I thought
you were a child.”

So
much for sisterhood.

To
be fair, I also struggle with all things masculine in France. But that’s quite
another story and I still have such a lot to learn…

I've been here 38 years and still get the genders mixed up. The worst are words like mémoire that can be BOTH depending on what they mean. In fact, the difficult ones for us (fluffy cloud, for example, that you would imagine to be feminine) either come from the neuters in Latin or swapped gender along the way, which is the case of nubes (nuage) which is feminine in Latin. It has been explained to me that the French get the genders right because they learn the gender at the same time as the word, whereas we learn the word, then the gender! I try to remember by associating an adjective such as blanche neige. I'm still convinced that neige should be masculine though.